Commercialized Christmas

Each year I cringe when I notice Christmas decorations and accessories popping up in glassy store windows during October or early November. The shiny ornaments, plastic trees, and fake, glittery snow become more and more artificial throughout the years. The way big businesses target people far in advance and use heartfelt holidays to pocket large sums of money ruin the depth and importance of the holiday itself. Christmas has been molded into a holiday which fits the needs of corporations, not the true needs of the people.

Rifts in families are created when individuals fall into the trap of a marketed Christmas. The younger generations often forget that it’s not just about the gifts and food, but also the coming together and rejoicing of families. The purpose of Christmas can be understood too lightly, while it consists of gift giving, it also is a union of family coming together to celebrate the season altogether and for some, a religious experience as well. People fighting to buy bargain-worthy presents and the kids who expect these gifts foster a negative attitude upon the holiday. The lack of spending time and valuing family is damaged by materialistic items and puts the importance of gifts over the accompaniment of relatives. A wish list becomes a demand of items, and while gift giving is an important tradition, it has become one that dominates the holiday to a negative extent.

The crux of the problem is the people who encourage and buy into these Christmas gimmicks. Society provides the basis for companies and businesses to sell these commodities in hopes of earning money. Not to say that a bit of cheesiness isn’t enjoyed during the holiday season, but the way Christmas is portrayed as a result of the peoples’ response causes it to lose its original value. If we stop falling into these traps, then maybe we can find the true value of Christmas within our families and learn to cherish the real definition of the holiday.

With this holiday season quickly approaching, I encourage people to buy Emersonian gifts of worth which connect to the recipient on a deeper and more thoughtful way to ensure a more meaningful Christmas.

China solved the “humane sicoal planning” problem by killing millions with starvation and then instituting a one child policy. Just think of the kind of government necessary to implement such a policy.Germany solved the “humane sicoal planning” problem by industrial planned genocide. The USSR solved the “humane sicoal planning” problem by killing millions with starvation and then some decades later collapsing.There seems to be a dearth of humane sicoal planners. The evidence is that sicoal planning attracts sociopaths. Why would that be? Well if you are going to run really big plans you have to ignore individual circumstances. Stalin put it well, “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”Note: due to the murdering by the North Vietnamese in the aftermath of the Vietnam War (and the rush to escape that murdering by so many) we have in America quite a vibrant Vietnamese community. For the most part they make excellent citizens. I believe the North Vietnamese would fit into the “social planning” rubric you favor. Some how they missed the humane part.In fact that seems to be a reoccurring fact in history. Fortunately it was all explained by Nobel Prize Winner in Economics (the first I believe) Fredrick Hayek in his book: . It comes down to the fact that no 10,000 planners can know what 10 million people know. The 10 million if left alone can adapt and adjust. Plans are harder to change. If the planners have planned for cold weather and there is hot – the plan is in trouble. Free people can just go to the beach until it cools off. And there are incentive problems. How can 10,000 planners know exactly what incentives to put into the plan to get the 10 million to put their backs into it? That is solved in the “no plan” system by billions of transactions. And how do you account for in your plan: “When I left home this morning I was going to buy a very nice meal for lunch, but it started raining so I decided on a lesser meal and an umbrella.”Or “Comrade there is a shortage of umbrellas because of unusually heavy sustained rains. We could alter the plan to fix that problem. But it would destroy the plan.”